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Hay Festival 1995,
Sunday 28 May 1995

Hattersley recommends Arnold Bennett's family saga The Old Wives' Tale. Hattersley's own family trilogy is The Maker's Mark, In that Quiet, and Skylark Song. Moggach chooses Anne Tyler's The Accidental Tourist. Moggach's new novel, Changing Babies published in July.

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Public Discussion

Hay Festival 1995,
Saturday 27 May 1995

Mavis Nicholson presents the stories told to her by women from all walks of life about how they lived, worked, loved and managed during the war years, and about the freedoms, the hopes and terrors, and the postwar adjustments that had to be made. Mavis hosts a discussion with audience participation. Please come along and tell your story.

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A Good Read

Hay Festival 1995,
Saturday 27 May 1995

Creative Reading along the lines of the popular Radio 4 programme in which writers recommend favourite books. booker winner Rubens chooses Thomas Keneally's Schindler's Ark, recent filmed by Stephen Spielberg. Rendell Recommends Samuels Butler's novel The Way of All Flesh.

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Hay Festival 1995,
Sunday 28 May 1995

Margaret Drabble introduces her biography of the novelist and critic Angus Wilson, one of the most colourful, controversial and entertaining figures of the post-war literary world, author of Anglo-Saxon Attitudes and The Old Men at the Zoo. Drabble traces the influences of Wilson's bizarrely extended family, his years as a librarian at the British Museum - interrupted by a grim spell in the code-breaking unit at Bletchley Park - and his unexpected liberation as a successful writer.

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L. A. Stories

Hay Festival 1995,
Sunday 28 May 1995

The hugely popular presenter of Film 95 Talks to Classic FM's John Russell about the lastest adventure of his Hollywodd sleuth Bobby Lwnnox in the itty new thriller The Mickey Mouse Affair. Kerr introduces his $1,000,000 thriller Gridiron -about a state-of-the-art "smart" building in downtown LA, whose computer revolts against its architects like a contemporary Frankenstein.

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Hay Festival 1995,
Sunday 28 May 1995

Herbert Rowse Armstrong was accused of poisoning his wife with arsenic, and after a sensational trial was found guilty and executed in 1922, the only solicitor to be hanged, In the light of Armstrongs unceasing protestations of innocence and the highly circumstantial evidence that suggest a questionable judgement, Hay solicitor Martin Beales, reopens the files and makes the case for Armstrong's innocence. He is joined by robin Odell, author of Landmarks in 20th Century Murder, whose book about Armstrong inspired the recent television film Dandelion Dead. The event is chaired by Mavis Nicholson. Beales book, Dead Not Buried is launched at the Festival, but will be available only through Pembertons Bookshop in Hay, from 12th May.

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Hay Festival 1995,
Sunday 28 May 1995

The Novelist And screenwriter talks about his work and introduces his new short story collection The Destiny of Nathalie "X". Boyd's award-winning books include A Good Man in Africa, An Ice Cream War, The New Confessions, Brazzaville Beach, The Blue Afternoon.

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The Raymond Williams Lectures

Hay Festival 1995,
Sunday 28 May 1995

The Historian Eric Hobsbawm talks to Dai Smith about his histroy of the Twentieth Century. "It takes far greater gifts - and far greater nerve - to simplify and scintillate than to criticise and to complicate. This book displays both these admirable qualities in abundance." - New Society.

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Hay Festival 1995,
Sunday 28 May 1995

Sher's new novel Cheap Lives is a murderous love story contrasting its protagonists' experiences of the divided country of South Africa as it strumbles towards democracy. Sher's acting roles have included The History Man on television and Richard III on stage. He has written two other novels The Indoor Boy and Middlepost - praised by The Guardian as "fearfully accomplished... peeling away skeins of history with blinding imaginative certainty."

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Hay Festival 1995,
Sunday 28 May 1995

Maddox's D. H. Lawrence: The Married Man won the 1994 Whitbread Biography Prize. Ken Russell has filmed Lawrence's novels Women in Love, The Rainbow, and Lady Chatterley. They talk to the Mirror's television critic about the language and images of the books and films.

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Richard Dawkins talks to Matt Ridley

Hay Festival 1995,
Monday 29 May 1995

Dawkins broke new ground in the theory of evolution with his book The Selfish Gene. He has contnued to promote the Darwinian cause in The Extended Phenotype and The Blind Watchmaker. His River Out of Eden is the river of DNA, a river of information that defines the genetic make-up of the species, uninfluenced by the experiences and acheivements of that species, and uninfluenced by another powerful source of potential contamination: sex. He discusses his theories of sexual recombination and the new tributaries of his DNA river with The Telegraph's Matt Ridley, author of The Red Queen.

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The Shakespeare Lecture - Birth of a Play

Hay Festival 1995,
Monday 29 May 1995

The playwright analyses The Merchant of Venice and describes how and why he wrote his own play Shylock - not a rewrite of the Shakespeare, but and original work based on the same three stories; illustrated with readings from Shylock, which is set in the C16th Jewish Ghetto of Venice. Wesker is the author of 32 plays, short stories, and his autobiography As Much As I Dare.

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Hay Festival 1995,
Monday 29 May 1995

The former hostage, and author of An Evil Cradling, talks to the Independant's Chief Political Commentator, and 1995 Commentator of the Year about his reading, and his enthusiasm for the poetry of his fellow Irishman Padriac Fiace, author of ruined of RuinedPages.

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The Classics

Hay Festival 1995,
Monday 29 May 1995

Which books do we define as classics? Whom do we include or dismiss and why? In this game of Fantasy Festival, Kaleidoscope's Paul Vaughan chairs and open discussion about the creation of a cannon of literary classics with the panellists Dame Iris Mursoch, Professor John Bayley, publisher Peter Washington, and Daniel Johnson, Literary Editor of The Times. The discussion will be recorded for broadcast on Radio 4's Kaleidoscope on Tuesday 30th May.

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English Fictions

Hay Festival 1995,
Monday 29 May 1995

Faulks' best-selling WWI novel Birdsong is "an amazing book - among the most stirringly erotic I have read for years" - Daily Mail and "a book with the power to reveal the unimagined" - Time Out. Hornby's first novel High Fidelity follows the success of Fever Pitch - "a sophisticated study of obsession, families, masculinity, class, identity, growing-up, loyalty, depression and joy" - The Observer. Williams' new novel From Wimbledon to Waco is the hilarious sequel to Two and a Half men in a Boat and continues the success of The Wimbledon Poisoner and They Came From SW19. It confirms his status as "The best comic novelist in the country" - The Times. Chaired by Bronwen Maddox

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The Waterstone's Lecture

Hay Festival 1995,
Monday 29 May 1995

To celebrate the publication of her first collection of new poetry for over a decade, the Canadian writer talks about her writing and the Genesis of her poems in Morning in the Burned House, which draw on classical and popular myth and the more personal concerns of love and the death of her father. "Atwiid brings all the violence of mythology into the present world...she is the quiet Mata Hari, the mysterious, violent... who pits herself against the ordered, too clean world like an arsonist" - Michael Ondaatje."

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Hay Festival 1995,
Tuesday 30 May 1995

Roger Barnard celebrates Agatha Christie as the supreme crime writer of the century, who forged a new sort of relationship with readers and took crime writing, particularly thw hodunnit, in directions in which current writers, often grudgingly and ungratefully, still follow her.

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Robert Graves and The White Goddess

Hay Festival 1995,
Tuesday 30 May 1995

To celebrate Grave' centenary, his nephew and biographer investigates the mystery of The White Goddess, that perennial source of inspiration, and relates the work to the poet's musehaunted private life.

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Tom Paine

Hay Festival 1995,
Tuesday 30 May 1995

Keane introduces his life of the great c18th radical, scourge of the monarchy, the church, and the houses of parliament, who wrote the defining articles of faith for both the American and French Revolutions - "Common Sense" and "The Age of Reason." Paine's extraordinary treaty Rights of Man identifies and argues many of the causes closest to contemporary political life, and marks him as Britain's most orginal and influential political thinker.

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Love and Marriage

Hay Festival 1995,
Saturday 3 June 1995

Three writers of extremely popular fiction talk about the big themes with the best-selling author of Foetal Attraction. Rosie Thomas' writing is "as fascinating as an overhead" - Cosmopolitan. She talks about A Simple Life. Tim Waterstone's new novel An Imperfect Marriage continues the success of Lilley and Chase - "grappling with emotion, morality and wrinkles in the male" - Mail on Sunday.

Sally Brampton's Lovesick is a bittersweet novel and friendship in the late 80's under the shadow of AIDS, and confirms the storytelling flair she exhibited in Good Grief.

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Mrs. Jordan's Profession

Hay Festival 1995,
Saturday 3 June 1995

Tomalin's books about Mary Wollstonecraft, Katharine Mansfield and Nelly Ternan have established her as Britain's foremost living biographer. At the end of the C18th Dora Jordan, the subject of her new book, was the greatest comic actress the theatre had known, adored by public and high society alike. She became the consort of the future king William IV, lived with him in domestic happiness, and bore him ten children. She died alone, in obscurity, and when a biography of William IV was published in 1884, her name did not even appear in it. What happened?

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Penguin Modern Poets 1

Hay Festival 1995,
Saturday 3 June 1995

Kit Wright's books for children and adults include The Bear Looked Over The Mountain, Bump-starting the Hearse, and Selected Poems. Blake Morrison has produced two collections of poetry, Dark Glasses and The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper, and the award-winning memoir And When Did You Last See Your Father?

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The Crack

Hay Festival 1995,
Saturday 3 June 1995

Two leaders of Ireland's astonishing literary renaissance read and discuss their work with the Lebanese novelist Hanan Al-Shaykh, author of Beirut Blues. The Dead School is the new novel from Patrick McCabe, the award-winning author of the The Butcher Boy. Patterson is the author of Burning Your Own, Fat Lad and now Black Night At Big Thunder Mountain.